skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reducing lift-to-drag ratio (for sailplanes for example) boils down to increasing the aspect ratio (the ratio between the width of the wing and the wingspan) and selecting an airfoil with a high coefficient of lift over coefficient of drag (wings generate drag through flying, and the wings which generate the most lift aren't necessarily efficient, which is why planes have flaps).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drag.jpg for the different types of drag on an aircraft (the 'pushing stuff through the air' drag is called parasitic, and the 'side-effect of lift generation' drag is induced).

The problem is that by doing this, you increase the structural mass of the wing for a given lift as you need a longer wing. There is a point on the optimisation curve between increase in efficiency from AR & the increase in structural weight from longer wings. Boeing and Airbus have teams of people who do this stuff for a living.

There are also human factors involved, like airports being set up for a maximum wingspan, and people being unlikely to choose an airline with slower flights.
Well, I'm not checking when people are trying to post but when they try to register--sorry if I wasn't clear.

The forum requires registration (and verification) before posting, so once they're registered there aren't any restrictions. And one of the benefits of this check is that there aren't any "human verifications" visible to the user. In fact, I could probably do away with the email validation too.
Hey, good post! I'm in total agreement.

I am starting a company and was in the same situation as all non-technical founders: hire an agency, give away half the company to a tech co-founder, or learn how to build it myself.

I went with the third option. Not only is it extremely gratifying to build it with your own hands, but it means I can make quick decisions and changes on the fly, the only cost is my time, and the vision and execution are 100% aligned!
That was my first impression too but I think his point is that the web was already social because people were already using (and still do) out of band mechanisms to socially share web links. The new social web is just using the web itself to stream those previously OOB messages.

This is in contrast to saying that before the social web people used the web individually, looking up information by themselves but not interacting socially about the web.
That's the point.

I think we can all agree that site owners are interested in "social networking" as the mechanism by which their content is shared and discovered by people passing links around. Essentially, the propagation of "word of mouth".

But they've been tracking data based on a definition of "social networking" that only includes the big social networking sites.

And that when they broaden the definition to "this traffic is the likely result of social networking" to "someone has directly requested a deep link without referrer data", they see that even the sum of traffic from all those huge sites is just the tip of the iceberg.

Which comports what we all already know. Which is that Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/et al didn't invent any new social behaviors. They just aggregated large chunks of them.
I don't think it is appropriate behavior, but I don't think it is the common case.
My personal favourite quick-fix (which doesn't stand up to targeted attacks, but is a very effective band-aid), is to put the following :
<input type='text' name='website' style='display:none'>

Then disallow any form submissions server-side which contain a value for 'website'. Automated bots can't resist filling out that field.
9 times out of 10 I agree with you, but HN is a rare site on which there are often genuine causes for a throwaway account, when people have good input to make on a thread but for work related reasons can't do it under a name that their colleagues/boss/etc. might recognise.
I agree it is very confusing to figure out the exact intent from the text.

In the model i suggested you would look up and input a code that referred to a song, and it would start the recorder when that song was played (working like traffic report alerts meets TiVo). No spamming.

By broadcasting real-time streams via TV you would get a bandwidth ~400 songs/day/channel (a big selection for the time). To me 'subscribing to interest categories' would be exactly like subscribing to a cable channel; and it would give you the legal right to that group of songs.[0]

It seems 'TV cable' was definitely a transmission method (very unclear if the phone was an alternative data vehicle or just for control), and AFAIK there was no way of doing anything on-demand with TV cable. To get similar quality of audio via the phone would have taken ages[1], tying up the phone for a long time (+ associated costs). The only problem with the streaming model is that you have to wait for a song to come around. But you would be able to get a newly released song right away on it's first play (and nothing was on demand at the time) so it wouldn't be a big issue IMO.

Occam's razor suggests the stream concept is most likely; it fits the existing models and technology much closer. It would have been technically simple to implement and vastly cheaper.

--

0. I think this is the real 'innovation' in this, rather than delivery method, which i'm not certain Zappa was 100% on.

1. i remember 128KB songs took ~15 minutes on 56K, so we are talking over an hour, even if we ignore the lack of MP3, processing/ temp storage requirements. Remember he talks about quality. Don't forget your landline was the only real-time contact you had with people who weren't in your road.
Exactly right, and there is a threshold set. Though it's not used when people try to post but rather when they try to register, I'd imagine it'd work similarly well on an "open" comment page. For a while at least.
I had the opportunity to work with Frank Zappa years ago. We enjoyed many long conversations during dinner. He was a really interesting man. Lots of, shall we say, unique, ideas. He had a particular distain for organized religion and politicians, placing both of them as evils that take advantage of the poor, gullible and uninformed. One night he proposed the idea of creating a new church that would take everything all the other religions said you could not do and made it OK. His words: "There's a market that is not being served out there".
> The point of this is simply to show that, unlike what the article will have you believe, it is entirely possible to be a woman in the tech industry, like your job, get on well with your colleagues (even when most of them are, shock horror, men), and be treated in a totally fair way.

I don't think any of that is contrary to the original article. I'm not sure that implying it is is entirely honest.
At which level do you mean this game?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(board_game)

;-)
Simply amazing. I hadn't heard about "Life enthusiasts" until reading the linked articles in the post. The OTCA metapixel (http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel) is what allows this to work.

I bet Dwarf Fortress and Life enthusiasts would get along.
Why not support them? Pocket/Instapaper/Readability support is pretty much a given in most content apps these days. And blocking others from your content definitely goes against the spirit of Instapaper.

It is reminiscent of Microsoft's strategy tax. Making a product worse cause it may harm your other businesses.
I'd agree except that it's fairly well established that Amazon doesn't make much money from the content either.

They are trying to grow marketshare and build the ebook market, but investors should know that Amazon has razor-thin margins on content and no-margins at all on hardware sales.
Hey man,

Wow, I really admire your determination to learn how to build it yourself. I can only imagine the amount of time you're devoting to it. You're in an interesting position because as a solo founder you're responsible for so many aspects of the business.

How do you balance working on the product versus acquiring customers vs operations?

Kudos either way!
A seven day trial period is too short.
Reddit Bans Creepshots & CreepSquad, Subreddits That Fueled Its War with Gawker
>Given a little bit of time, perhaps she will see that some sexism-based discrimination does exist

Did you skip the "reading the article" part? She made it quite clear that she has experienced sexism before, just not yet in the web industry. She didn't say sexism doesn't exist, just that it doesn't seem to be a web/it problem.

>It is a cold, hard fact: women make less than men.

No, it isn't. The wage gap myth is just that, a myth. Women are paid the same as men when they work the same number of hours in the same job. Averaging the pay of all women and the pay of all men shows men making more, but they are also working more hours and are disproportionally represented in high risk, high pay jobs.
I'm skeptical of claims that "food problems are just distribution, we produced enough food to feed everyone" claims, especially if it starts with "well, first everyone must switch to vegetarianism... easy!", and would need some convincing that it's possible to "end world hunger" without massive drastic changes.
Hackers & Hustlers Jobs
I just discovered the 'kibitz' command on linux, which is basically remote desktop assistance for linux (well, remote terminal). Apparently, this is used for chatting quite often too (i.e open up a text editor).

EDIT: screen can do this too! screen -x can attach to a non-detached screen session.
The same kind of logic would lead us to believe that the dearth of men in nursing is a result of sexism against men.
> No, diff and merge algorithms are symbol-oriented.

Point taken, and as soon as someone puts word-by-word merging into svn or git, I'll change my opinion.

> I'd submit, though, that if a basic diff/merge program is being relied on too closely in a scenario where that actually causes any consequential problems

[EDIT removed some response -- maybe "that" referred to a narrower scenario than I thought and parent didn't intend any insult.]
Given current technology, airships are slow, and suck at handling high winds.
Ballistic transport would cost a lot more fuel than current methods, as you need huge amounts of energy to escape gravity.

If you are going for crazy, why not use a nuclear reactor? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_X-6
Sure. Let's look at our own industry cluster.

What is superficial, but denotes status among hackers?

Having an expensive standing desk when everyone else sits.

Having a shaved head when that's not the societal norm. Having long hair (male) or particularly short hair (female). Interestingly dyed hair for either.

Extreme coffee ordering used to be a status marker; now it's widespread and isn't, so much. What was once an indicator that you lived in a rich urban core is now an indicator that Starbucks has opened a branch in your WalMart.

Running a Mac when the company standard was a Windows box; running an Air when the standard was an MBP. The first generation iPhone, and for a couple of weeks, the most recent. (Then everybody else has them.)

Claiming more physical space is a status marker; humans seem to be wired for that along with all the other primates. Having more space and not doing anything with it is a more powerful marker.

Siri and similar voice-recognition assistants could become the new secretaries. If they improve significantly, look for an always-on version that looks for a keyword trigger and talks back through a speaker. Having an invisible servant would be a serious status marker, but only if it becomes both reliable and ostentatious. Having the quiet space necessary to do this regularly is a marker by itself.
Should have indicated that - I don't know the details of the deal, but I do believe there's a 'x hours for y% equity', but it may be 'x hours now for delayed profit sharing'.
One reason for the reluctance of personal contact outside of work is the fear of a sexual harassment suit. There have been lots of stories going around how small things have been twisted into a "hostile" work environment. In a previous workplace, they got sued by a woman who claimed that one of the employees having a britiney spears poster in his cube constituted as sexual harassment.

Also, men tend to censor what they say when women are arround.
While I (and she) do agree that she's not the best person to represent women in tech (she says so herself) a lot of people who have been do agree in the comments, and she does work with a big company that does development (.net, Windows Phone work, design and everything else in between too in a giant open plan office. So she does see more than you'd initially think)
I'd hardly call 30% a "razor-thin" margin. That's what Amazon's cut is ever since the publishers pushed them into the Agency model.
> literally raped her of all her legal rights

Really? That's the way you want to describe this?
I'm technical, I build stuff myself, so take my opinion with a pinch of salt.

If you have built a non-technical throw-away prototype (paper, wireframe, ...), at some point you may find your testing is limited. IMO, a technical THROW-AWAY prototype is ok to be outsourced, because it'll take all the short cuts it can, and when you are done testing you want to change at least 50% of it anyway, so throwing away and starting from scratch is the right answer.

That said, I don't know if there are any agencies that do this. But you could probably find a freelancer that enjoys this type of work. You definitely need a tech co-founder when you build the real thing, though.
Interesting. I think a value-based approach would leave the founders better off than an equity deal.
And this is what gives Amazon a great advantage vs. other device makers. Apple gets some revenue too from their Store, Google some less, and that's it.

I don't see how other tablet makers have a chance to compete. And I would expect top of the line Kindle to be $50 actually (give away the razor sell the blades...), and others free with any digital content purchase larger than $250.
Meet Polaris, a map library for Android
Yes, for a developer, there are many ways to do this.

PageKite aims to be more reliable, fast and convenient. It also provides niceties like preconfigured SSL certificates and automatic DNS subdomain provisioning and is smart about reconnecting and adapting to changes in the network environment.

The downside is, to reap those benefits you have to learn to use a new tool. :-)

Edit: Also, you've got our pricing wrong. We ask for $3/month, but you can go even lower if you are a hobbyist or buy a group subscription and get a bulk discount.
They've got a LOT of teams. A large number of SpringSource developers are in North Sydney, Australia. So far as I'm aware, the Spring team probably aren't working on this.
Only the indefinite articles are not capitalized.
Weak Smoking Restrictions – Russian Tobacco Bill
Weak Smoking Restrictions – Russian Tobacco Bill
Interesting license for contributing back. You have to sign an agreement? Why?!?
This is very interesting stuff. What I'd like to know is how you could measure the size of each project. Otherwise this could be easily skewed by a user creating a ton of empty, unfinished, or even dummy projects once they have heard about this study. There isn't really anything stopping them on GitHub.

As a last comment:
The descending grey bands represent the rank quartiles, e.g., the top band is the 100th percentiles, then 80th percentile, etc. If there are 5 of them, doesn't that make them quintiles (which my spellchecker claims isn't a word, haha)?
Yea, just to be clear. there is no evidence that the appearance of human beings has changed since the beginning of recorded human history ie the oldest known drawings/paintings look just like we look now.
Well, sleep is optional of course!

Otherwise it's just a case of being efficient with time and prioritising tasks, because everything works in lock-step i.e. have idea, get feedback, refine; create mockups, get feedback, refine; build mvp, get feedback, refine etc. so I take each step at a time.

Having said that, I will be looking for a more accomplished developer to join me as a co-founder imminently because the range of tasks and the timeframe do make it impossible to do everything myself.

Best of luck with Kera by the way, it looks like a great idea.
The problem with that is that people's perception of what it means is more important than what is in a dictionary. Given the dictionary definition, one would have to assume 100% of women would be feminists. By the dictionary definition, it makes no sense for any women not to be a feminist. Yet 75% of women refuse to self-identify as feminists. The baggage that comes with the term has too much weight for the dictionary definition to matter any more.
Some blog platforms whitelist comments from people who have had previous comments approved. I'm pretty sure these meaningless (but positive) comments are an attempt to get on that list.
Just to correct your "razor-and-blades business model, made famous by Gillette" comment, Gillette never did that (which the wikipedia article alludes to).

While the blades were very high-margin, Gillette razors were quite expensive, about $150 in current dollars.
This is one of those topics where you have to be careful not to slip into meaningless semantics where you're just arguing about how we should use some word and what things should be named.
Hidden Agenda
Survival Tips for Live Wireframing
I know both the writers very well.

Faruk and I have known each other for 8 years, we tried to start a business together and I have a lot of respect for him.

Laura is my flatmate and best friend.

They tried to talk on Twitter beforehand, and it wasn't going very well (as Twitter does.)

She wanted to write a post on sexism for a very long while now. This was a catalyst to finally get it done. She also wanted it to be public so people got a full view of the opinions.

I, as a man, feel if I don't agree with posts like Faruk's, a lot of people take it as I don't care about women's rights. It can get messy easily.

Her opinions were not destructive in my opinion. She was frustrated that yet another man was telling all us what sexism was and that she felt his intentions weren't necessarily good, but more "holier than thou" and that it didn't help anything.

I have biases, so take it with a grain of salt.
I implemented that with some success. Much more successful was to simply require Javascript.
Most of the publishers dropped the agency model:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2012/09/ebook-settlement-big...

Edit: additionally, Amazon has their Prime service which gives additional discounts to subscribers who tend to be big purchasers. Free shipping, online movies and TV shows are $0 while many ebooks are heavily discounted.

All of that contributes towards Amazon having razor-thin margins for Kindle content.
He did mention that, but of course there's no way to figure out how much of that traffic is from https referrals. Of course, I wouldn't be shocked if 90%+ of https referrals are from gmail, which would put it right back to what he is assuming: email, IM, etc.
Interesting view and breakdown of the post. But I believe the best advice in general is the same as what parents would say to their child and that's to get an education. This doesn't mean one can't succeed in life without an education, but without experience your odds are always better if you have one.
I thought that would happen as more people added rel=nofollow to links in comments... hasn't happened yet though.
I used to work in a web agency in France. By chance, all my projects were e-commerce startups that outsourced their development and ops to us. One may argue that dev was not a core competency for them, but I personally doubt it. Even with our best effort, we were not as invested as an in-house tech co-founder would have been, not by far.

Of course, other reasons prevailed, and anyone who knows French business pecularities would see some more reasons for this state of affairs. For one, most French startups, especially e-commerce, are founded by business school graduates, ex managemant consultants, basically the MBA crowd. They mostly don't want to have a tech co-founder, as tech work is seen as low-status. Some of their failure modes are directly related to this. So is their focus on b2b partnerships and bizdev even for e-commerce.

There are, of course, French startups run by tech people, and I know plenty who do well and run circles around direct competitors that fit the above patterns.
You make a great point. But I'm trying to think about why you'd be building a throw-away prototype. Either you'd want to prove a technical challenge, or you'd want to make sure you're building something that a customer wants to buy. I can't really see the logic in outsourcing the first use-case, I mean that's the core tech of your startup, and I don't know many agencies out there that specialize in that type of heavy lifting.

But from the cust-dev perspective, where do you see lightweight prototypes (powerpoint, paper, wireframes, omnigraffle, etc) falling short?
How JavaScript programs bring dynamic behaviour with Reflective Functionality
Show HN: Ready to move on and give your MVP a new home...
I think you proved the point. The startups that focus on technical leadership run circles around those that don't.

Why do you think that's the case? Faster iteration?
I'm quite curious about how sexism affects the broader tech industry as a whole, as it seems to not affect my niche area much at all.

I work in ASIC design, and we have probably even fewer women than software development. In general, I have never had the impression that sexism is much of a problem in our narrow little field. But since I'm male, I thought that perhaps I was blind to the problem. So I asked a female colleague, and she said she had never experienced any sexism on the job, period. Now, we're a small company, and I like to think we're a pretty progressive, decent bunch, so no surprises that she's never seen it internally. But we're also a professional services company, so we work with many clients, big and small, and we don't control their hiring process. But no - she's never experienced any sort of sexual discrimination at work with clients, either.

I've not been able to come up with a plausible explanation of why the problem does not seem to affect us in the same way that it might in a different sub-field.
It depends. I can tell you from experience that even a medium-sized website that ranks well on (legitimate) pharmaceutical terms is a huge target for spammers.
The most common patterns all have names, just because it's so much easier to talk about a "loaf" than "you know, the sort of triangular one with the corners missing". This page shows the relative frequency of a kind of pattern called "still lifes" http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_common_still_lifes but most of the pages linked from there are auto-generated stubs. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Loaf

Edit: You're right, people put a lot of time into discovering and engineering things in Life. But it's an odd mix of cleverness and brute-forcing. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Glider_synthesis
Pro Pinball looks to Kickstarter a second time, after failed comeback campaign
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